


ballad of rose and thorn.

by admiral_of_the_red



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: A little drabble about immortality and roses, Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Amnesia, Ballads, Depression, England is a sort of pagan tree god, Fairies, France is the human he meets over the years, Historical Hetalia, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Minor Violence, Moral Ambiguity, Nature Magic, No flowers were harmed in the making of this fic, No one is a country, Other, Paganism, Reincarnation, Roses, Russia isn't the villain for once, Sad, Sad with a possible happy ending, This is only a tiny bit influenced by otgw, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 12:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19019914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/admiral_of_the_red/pseuds/admiral_of_the_red
Summary: Roses are such curious, deceptive flowers with their jealous thorns, their ephemeral beauty, and the way they return to life even after death. On his 200th birthday, Arthur meets a human who is a rose in disguise, and watches him bloom and die only to do it over and over again.//"The more things change, the more they stay the same."—Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr





	ballad of rose and thorn.

**Author's Note:**

> "We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts."
> 
> —William Hazlett

_Wending, walking, wandering, one step after another, one foot in front of the other, a hundred miles before the sun dies, a hundred more after it does. The only things he knows is this aching desire to seek and find, but of what, and where? He no longer knows. All he can see is red, red, red; the devil’s color, what is the devil but an angel colored red?_

He has been wandering the endlessness of the world for six days (and what was he doing before those six days of wandering? It is yet another thing he should have known, but doesn’t) and how unfitting it was for a godless beast such as he to be forced to stop and rest on the seventh, for a dull, distant affliction suddenly pricks his heel and startles him to a stop.

It takes him a moment to return to the present, for the time he spent walking was also spent reposing in the back of his cavernous mind, thinking and feeling nothing while his legs moved of their own accord. Being raised to the surface of consciousness after so long, it is like taking a breath of air after having already drowned. He is dazed and disorientated, and his body interacts with his mind like uncooperative strangers, but more importantly, he is  _awake._

It takes him even longer to recognize the strange feeling creeping into his bare foot, a sensation he almost knows not how to identify, for he hasn't felt any pain for a long, long time. His skin is rough and hard in places, a contrasting intermixture of supple flesh and brittle bark, and the dark, twisting antlers growing out of his skull reminisced the branches of a tree in death. In ten years, he would have to duck to the ground under every low place he encountered. For all he didn’t know, ten years could have passed during the time he takes to ponder it.

_Pain, the stem of the flower blooming with petals of blood within his foot._

The feeling itself isn't unlike other painful impressions he remembers, like the roses growing out of his flesh or the garden of thorns taking root under his skin. However, he knows not of where these memories came from, yet his mind hooks on to them as if they were a desperate, dying fish, refusing to neither let the animal swim free nor die where it was hung.

_Inside, there is something missing within him. Something that was there, and then wasn’t. Something he’s forgotten, and yet hasn’t. But the sun doesn’t rise dwelling on the emptiness of the sky._

He tears his gaze from the horizon and looks down at the ground, and realizes his bare foot is planted in a patch of wild roses, the deep red flowers absolutely everywhere and embracing all of him that they can reach. Numerous thorns embedded in their long stems protect the beauty of their petals with jealousy. The obvious conclusion is that a few such thorns have twisted themselves into his foot. He is a stranger to these plants, receiving due punishment for his intrusion.

He takes a step back, and crouches down to examine the flower he has unintentionally crushed underfoot, noting that despite being flattened, it is still luscious and full, the petals softer than silky water and seeming to spill from the stem like a fountain overflowing. It would live, should he leave it where it lay; broken, but still beautiful.

And yet despite all of this, he has never before seen something so _repulsive._

Maybe once in a time passed, he would have found this stubborn flower charming. But now that he has stems for veins and petals for blood, such things are no longer beautiful to him. Nothing is beautiful to him. He has seen far too much of the world’s ugliness reflecting on the backs of his eyelids to remain convinced that beauty still exists in the world, let alone in a thriving state underfoot. His dreams are mirrors more than anything else, and to look upon himself, he needs only to close his eyes.

The wild grass, slick with what might be his blood in some places, sways at him, unaware that it couldn't bleed if it tried. A red, thorny flower breaks the surface of his forearm, pushing its way to the surface and splitting his skin, but he is as indifferent to it as he is the roses below. He is past the point of feeling anything stronger than detached discontent and the desire to walk and find.

However, he has lingered too long, and it’s time to keep moving. He doesn't bother to remove the thorns from his foot. He ignores the faint chattering of small voices who curse at him in tongues not unlike the harsh sound of rain beating against stone.

(If the fae didn’t want him to bleed on their flowers, they really shouldn’t preside over such sharp, jealous plants. The fault is not his own, so he doesn’t apologize to anyone but himself.)

He walks, and walks, but unlike the previous time previous six days ago, he remembers every moment. His eyes refuse to close, and his mind refuses to open. Each day passes like a drop of colored oil on a strip of bark, slowing revealing a picture of the world in his head. He doesn’t count minutes; rather, he counts clouds, dewdrops, and footsteps. The roses growing out of his skin are unreliable time-keepers, for they all wither and die sporadically, relying on the minuscule changes of his whims to determine whether their lives are over or merely just beginning.

The only conclusion he can ever come to is that he is the one inconstant in a world that does nothing but change and stay the same.

The roses yearn without words for care and attention, but because he refuses to indulge weeds by principle, they grow darker and thornier with neglect, twisting around the slit between his skin and the underlying muscle, but it is all in vain. He is the utter example of disconnection. He can’t feel anything at all.

(Until today, when he stepped on a rose growing out of the ground and actually _felt_ it. What was so different about that wild rose that made it memorable among the hundreds living and dying on his skin? Why was it then, that he stopped feeling nothing and truly felt a connection with the world for the first time since he can remember?)

He doesn’t ponder it long, and decides he doesn’t care about ways and means. Tomorrow, he will likely forget this ever even happened. The absence of a future renders the past and the present meaningless. He prefers to think only of forever, though not by any spoken name.

And so it is. He walks, his legs lead by a vague sensation of what could have been purpose, his roses and their thorns weaving themselves within his body, between his fingers, around his crown. He doesn’t ignore the thorns that press into his foot, rather, he merely assigns their presence a high degree of unimportance. He comes no closer to his destination, wherever it may be, but he doesn’t stray too far from it, either. There is still yet time to change the seventh day until it, too, is the same.

He forgets that he is even awake, after a while. All is as it once was, and shall remain.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for going on and on, lmao. France will make an appearance soon, I promise :>


End file.
